What’s the U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan?

A poppy field in Afghanistan

W.J. Astore

Six years ago, I wrote an article about Afghanistan that opened like so:

In the U.S. debate on Afghanistan, virtually all experts agree that it’s not within the power of the American military alone to win the war. For that, Afghanistan needs its own military and police force, one that is truly representative of the people, and one that is not hopelessly corrupted by drug money and the selfish concerns of the Karzai government in Kabul.

What has changed since 2009? Karzai is gone, but corruption remains endemic. The U.S. military is still there, at least until 2017 and likely for far longer. And drug money! In a searching summary of the opium trade in recent Afghan history, Alfred McCoy at TomDispatch.com shows convincingly that the drug trade has flourished despite, or rather because of, American efforts to block it or control it. In his words:

In the almost 15 years of continuous combat since the U.S. invasion of 2001, pacification efforts have failed to curtail the Taliban insurgency largely because the U.S. could not control the swelling surplus from the county’s heroin trade. As opium production surged from a minimal 180 tons to a monumental 8,200 in the first five years of U.S. occupation, Afghanistan’s soil seemed to have been sown with the dragon’s teeth of ancient Greek myth. Every poppy harvest yielded a new crop of teenaged fighters for the Taliban’s growing guerrilla army.

At each stage in Afghanistan’s tragic, tumultuous history over the past 40 years — the covert war of the 1980s, the civil war of the 1990s, and the U.S. occupation since 2001 — opium played a surprisingly significant role in shaping the country’s destiny. In one of history’s bitter twists of fate, the way Afghanistan’s unique ecology converged with American military technology transformed this remote, landlocked nation into the world’s first true narco-state — a country where illicit drugs dominate the economy, define political choices, and determine the fate of foreign interventions.

McCoy’s article, which you should read here in its entirety, raises many questions, but for me the obvious one is this: What is the U.S. military doing in Afghanistan? What is its strategy?

If it’s trying to win Afghan hearts and minds, you can’t do that by destroying the main cash crop of so many people. If it’s trying to create a measure of stability, you can’t do that by mounting destructive military operations that spread chaos. If it’s trying to interdict the drug trade, you can’t do that successfully while maintaining the support of powerful interests in Afghanistan that profit so heavily from that trade.

After nearly 15 years, a sensible person would conclude that American interference in Afghanistan is only making matters worse. Afghan drug wars are a no-win scenario for U.S. troops. Lacking a coherent and sensible strategy that is attractive to Afghan power brokers, American forces should smarten up, load up, and pull out.

4 thoughts on “What’s the U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan?”

What do the wars in Kosovo, Syria, and Afghanistan have in common? Answer: oil pipelines. Proposed oil routes to sea ports. Americans are in Afghanistan for oil profits. To create political stability for a pipeline from the Stans to the Indian Ocean.

I remember many years ago seeing a similar picture: one showing an Afghan farmer carefully harvesting the opium from a poppy flower while a U.S. marine stood guard in the background. And to think that the Taliban had pretty much eradicated the opium trade as “un-Islamic” before the U.S. military overthrew them and put the drug-running warlords back in power. Stupidity does not even come close to describing the mind-numbing perversity of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan — not to mention the middle east, generally — especially any form of it which allows the U.S. miitary to play any part whatsoever. As Donald Trump likes to say: “they fight just for the sake of fighting, like vomiting.” I’ve got to hand it to the Donald for nailing that truth squarely on its pointed head.

I remember that Risen story, along with a few others. End result , even among the anti-war crowd : *crickets*.
I do remember a map of US bases, overlaid by a previous pipeline proposal. Guess what ? A match. I went to Google maps, satellite view. and it seemed like a whole lot of nothing, while much more heavily-populated areas were much more sparsely garrisoned.
In the 90s , a certain Texas governor carried water for Enron, trying to get a pipeline built through northern Afghanistan. His Afghan go-between was some guy named …..Hamid Karzai.
I’m sure it’s all coincidence. 😉